I realise asking about download speeds is not allowed on the forums - but i was wondering what peoples general experience has been over the last few months.

I have BT infinity, so my ISP speed is not an issue. However, downloading from iplayer used to be really fast, but in recent weeks i've noticed get_iplayer is reporting only 0.5 mb/s

Have other users noticed this? I didn't know if it was a problem with the BBC servers being overloaded, or throttled - as I assume get_iplayer just works with what it's given upstream.

Apologies if discussions on users experience downloading is forbidden - i'm just finding it really weird, especially as i've been using get_iplayer for years with such fantastic results.

UPDATE: Additionally, i get a lot of messages during the download saying things like "WARNING: Unexpected size for file segment", then it retries the download and continues. I'm sure these never appeared before in these numbers

I'm on exceptionally slow broadband in the temporary house I'm living in between selling one house and finding another. Speedtest.net gives about 1.8 Mbps down and 0.2 Mbps up.

I've noticed quite a few "WARNING: Unexpected size for file segment" type errors during most downloads from get_iplayer, and I never used to get them when I was on FTTC/VDSL ("fibre") at 18 Mbps down / 6 Mbps up at our previous house.

Despite what look like fairly dire warnings during the download of a programme, I've never found one that won't play, so evidently the error correction and resuming of download works seamlessly.


If you're on BT Infinity, you should be getting a good speed. You might want to run speedtest.net at various times of day to check how your speed varies as demand changes.

Also, try rebooting your router in case it's got itself confused - which happens more often than it should do ;-(

If you are using Windows you could try running the System Monitor and look at the Network Activity for perl.exe while you are downloading. This should show where you are downloading from.